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“You—want to hire me?”

“Of course I do. You still remind me of myself. Limited by circumstance. I wasted myself too long, too.” He took her shock for consideration and smiled widely. “Rome will stretch farther beyond your maps than you could fathom. If you come with me, you could see it all. To Gades, if you wanted, or Britannica. So long as you take notes and bring them back. I’ve heard the northmen have blue faces—I could pay anyone to go find it out, but they’d only lie, or take my money and die on the journey. You, you’re resourceful, you’re determined. I need someone I can actually trust.”

“You feel you can trust me?” Safinia asked, incredulous. “I’m considering killing you.”

“I know!” Livy said. “And I trust that you are telling me the truth! But I know how quickly you will forget when I show it to you, our Eternal City. This, here, this is nothing yet—what about temples as tall as five men, plunder from every continent, villas with frescos you could fall into? You would rather go home and lie in the dirt? Get bird shit in your hair?”

Around them, the blur of people changed. Safinia could see, hazily, buildings rise and tower around her. The pebbled ground became paved underfoot. Her heartbeat quickened, and she reminded herself it was an illusion—her feet could still feel the right ground. He hadn’t taken her yet.

“You’d join my staff, of course. My home is like nothing you’ve seen, not even like Numa’s villa. The walls are marble. I have tunnels beneath the tiles that heat my floor.” Livy’s eyes shone. She thought he might cry. “You can come with me to visit Gaius—Emperor Octavian. The living embodiment of Rome’s divinity. From his terrace, you can overlook the whole forum, watch people stream through it like a murmuration.

“There will be trees, Safinia, that shelter the skin like fans in the sky. Campanian wine that will make the best Etruscan blend you’ve ever had taste like dreck. And you will be worshipped, if people know what you are—I’ll take you to the homes of my contemporaries, where they carve the names of their Sabine ancestors on the walls so no one can mistake their greatness.”

Livy knelt, then, just as he had in Crustumerium, and put a hand over his heart. Safinia could see into her mind’s eye, the motion it would take to yank her spear from his other hand and drive it into his chest. But she’d never killed a man on his knees. “We can travel together again. Retrace our steps back through the hills. You will understand, then, I know you will—there’ll be none of that hacking through the brush. No chaos beyond the city wall. The people living along the Salaria, Safinia, they won’t be living in fear. They’ll have work to do, grain allotments, justice if they are wronged. You will see the world tamed.”

This, more than anything else, made her aghast. “Is Feronia not angry?” she asked. “Don’t you fear her?”

Livy scoffed. “No god is greater than Rome. The world is not alive yet, Safinia. Science, philosophy, civility—it hasn’t yet been birthed. You and your people are like animals to me, clawing in the dirt.” He looked up at her, his face naked with hope. “Let me elevate you from it. Let us journey there in brotherhood.”

Brotherhood. He finally agreed that she was some kind of patriarch. So neatly, it let him side-step the nasty, inferior business of her womanhood. She was already apart from this—why bother with her sisters, or the rest? What did their fear matter to him?

He clearly thought she would say yes. He couldn’t imagine her saying no.

Safinia uncurled one hand from the shaft of her spear and loosened her fingers. Let him think she was hesitating. He opened his hand to her, eyes alight. Then she lunged, levering her spear one-handed into his shoulder; the flay of his muscles, then bones, reverberated through her.

Livy screamed. Safinia grabbed the spear with both hands and yanked it out of his body, unstoppering a current of blood. He reeled back, clutching at the wound. His eyes were mad white when he looked at her. As if she’d betrayed him.

“Fuck you,” she gasped. “Never Rome. Never with you.”

His eyes narrowed. The force of her loss hit her then—he had never been her friend. Not even a misguided one, a man who thought he was doing right by someone he cared for. She was some kind of prop to him, in his fantasies about the Sabine. There was no way he could really know her and still think she would say yes to this.

“You’re lying,” he said. “I know you. You want to escape as much as I did.”

It wasn’t true. Safinia fought the bile rising in her stomach—all this blood and doubt. It wasn’t the same, standing before the house shrine and praying for things to change. It didn’t mean she wanted to leave Attice and Anesia behind. If they could come, too, a small voice asked, would you go? Would you bring them with Livy and leave all the rest to Romulus?

None of this mattered. It was distracting her from the real danger they were all in. Safinia turned—but Rome as it would be still flickered in the distance. A woman brushed past her with that odd nontouch. Safinia took an uncertain step forward, then another. What if she walked into the wrong Rome? She tried to focus on the sky—things unchanged in the distance. She’d reached the wolf statue as the sun was half-set, the light settling into wine-colored clouds. But ghostly torches were being lit around her—around Livy’s forum—and they blocked her from being able to tell.

Behind her, Livy laughed, his voice thick with pain. “How are you not getting this?” he asked. “I get to decide Rome’s past. And whether you’re in it or not.”

“You’re nothing more than a ghost,” she spat.

“In Cures, maybe. In Crustumerium. Not here.” He grinned. His teeth were red—he must have bit down on his tongue as he fell. “Do you want to know what Cures Sabini is in my time? It’s nothing. Barely more than a village. Everyone who matters has moved to Rome.”

“Let me leave.”

“No.” He was cold. The window shuttered. “This is for your own good. Drop the spear. I’m as eternal as Rome. And you told me yourself you never fight a man who can see you coming.”

“That’s when I fight strong men,” she said, and lunged. It no longer mattered to her that he was on the ground.

Livy rolled, much quicker than she expected him to, coming up to his feet with a knife she’d mistaken for a writing instrument when she saw it hanging from his belt. Safinia reversed her grip and shoved the butt of her spear into his stomach, forcing him to stagger back. Now they regarded each other with malice. Blood dripped on the pebbled ground.

“I didn’t lie when I told you I admired you,” Livy said, breathing hard. “In my time, claiming a Sabine ancestor is the boast of great men. We’ll worship your gods—even be led by some of your own people.”

“Numa,” Safinia said. She drove her spear forward and caught Livy’s side as he angled to avoid being run through. His knife came rapidly at her unguarded side; they broke apart again, him the bloodier this time.

He was faster and stronger than she’d imagined. There was none of that strangeness that came the last time she touched him—here he was completely manifest. The wound in his shoulder barely seemed to annoy him.

He pressed a hand to his side and looked at it with distaste. “Yes, King Numa Pompilius. He’s supposed to usher in eighty years of peace, order, religion. It doesn’t seem possible at his age, but they also say he’s god-touched. I can account for it in the narrative, shift the years around. It doesn’t matter when he’s born, not really.”